El Shaddai Brings Grand Vision Back to Console Gaming

Takeyasu Sawaki, the director of concept game El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron, previously worked as a lead artist on Devil May Cry and Okami, two classic video games distinguished by their high style—seen in the former’s ornate combat system, and the latter’s grand landscapes and creatures informed by East Asian brush paintings.

El Shaddai unites those two elements, and imports a third reagent: Judeo-Christian symbolism. The story is based on the relatively obscure and mostly non-canonical Book of Enoch, which details the fathering of the Nephilim by fallen angels who have taken human wives; and their subsequent punishment by the archangels. It’s safe to say the game diverges with its human protagonist Enoch, who with the divine ability to wield God’s weapons—more on this later—tracks down and confronts the fallen angels himself.

The game revels in its total difference; it has taken the phrase “inspired by” fully to heart. It does more than diverge from the religious text: it unravels a nonstop series of digressions and diversions, each generally more surprising and mind-expanding than the last. In doing so, El Shaddai proposes that major video games are capable of more than popcorn entertainment, spectacle, and even deeply involving stories, environments and moral choices. It’s too bad the game’s name is so willfully obscure, and its appeal so difficult to reduce to a bullet point. (“Somewhere in-between psychedelic and spiritual!” “Kind of profound?”)

A good point of comparison is Neil Gaiman’s ’90s comic series “The Sandman,” which played freely with religion and mythology while creating its own undefinable but firmly contemporary mythos. Like the “Sandman” books, El Shaddai represents the joyous work of artists run amok—each level of the tower, occupied by a fallen angel, is represented by a distinct art style. The game opens in a wintry and desolate mountainside, a desert of mortality. But it soon brings Enoch to a city that pulsates with the rhythm and color of endless fireworks, later to the ocean deep and to the distant future. Enoch is watched by a Lucifer (spelled Lucifel) dressed in black shirt and jeans who is constantly taking calls from God on his cell phone. The archangels are represented as swans, and there isn’t a single humanoid with feathery white wings in the game.

Especially in its first half, El Shaddai feels like a genuine journey. The far-flung corners of its world don’t resemble the calculated set pieces and clearly differentiated scenarios of Western shooters and role-playing games, nor the exotic fire and ice levels of video game past—candy coating on familiar ground. The game remains thoroughly unfamiliar, even after its seventh hour toward the end. One stage floats and shimmers atop the screen like a watercolor painting, the tasteful counterpart to a later stage that simulates the effect of being thrust headfirst into an oil painting: colors swirling deliriously, the drawn world barely discernible through thick brushstrokes covering the surface. Lest you fear this is a “painterly” game, its brightest moment is a cyberpunk motorcycle race through a dark city out of “Akira.” Occasionally the world flattens into two dimensions, the milieu shifting from “The Lord of the Rings” to “Tron” to Mario without missing a beat. These radical surface changes conjure a deep sense of geographic and emotional movement, more efficiently and poignantly than your usual open world or apocalyptic panorama.

El Shaddai is mostly about enjoying the scenery. But it’s safely in game territory, thanks to a Devil May Cry-style combat system of attacks, counterattacks, combos, special moves, and “Overburst” moves. Combat is purposefully streamlined—all the action can be performed with three buttons, like on a Sega Genesis; and while wearing his armor Enoch looks a bit like Mega Man (golden locks aside). Enoch can only wield one weapon at any time: an Arch (curved sword), Gale (projectile weapon) or Veil (shields/battering rams) that he must steal from an enemy. The battles have a rock-paper-scissors quality, and leave room to be built into dance-like performances with rhythmic button presses. Enemies range from the vaguely samurai-like armored angels to masked war pigs to ducks with boxing gloves for heads. No harpies or jumbo spiders.

For all these pleasures, El Shaddai dares to create meaning from deliberately un-fun sections. Three hundred years pass in its first half hour, a good part of which is spent pushing Enoch forward in silhouette as the credits roll. A title sequence with no action or exploration that can’t be skipped is virtually unheard of in a videogame, but by its end you suddenly find that you’ve already been through something. There is a lot of uneventful walking toward the horizon, and one extended course of jumping and quick-reflex obstacles seems to exist purely so that you can afterward question the motivations of your character and those around him. The late game features a lot of these platforming moments, which painfully highlight its almost-fatal flaw: the abstract art style makes spatial reasoning near-impossible. You’ll fall through a lot of holes in the ground and condemn the game maker.

In its better, contemplative moments, El Shaddai is sometimes New Age, other times psychedelic, and finally spiritual. Enoch frequently falls into the same battles with the same nemeses over and over, and these for once feel like meaningful repetitions—notes on a major scale—rather than lazy design. The story begins with lucid purpose and finally slows to a crawl with a “2001″-style dream sequence illustrating a sort of existential catalepsy.

In one sense a console beat ‘em up title, El Shaddai is also a bona-fide art game comparable to the experimental works of indie-game auteurs and to avant-garde film. And it hearkens back to the golden era of 16-bit videogames: when elegantly spare, sometimes infuriating gameplay came packaged with grand visual statements. El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron is available today on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

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